Gilles FauconnierIntroduction to Methods and Generalizations
To appear. Methods and Generalizations. In T. Janssen and G. Redeker (Eds). Scope
and Foundations of Cognitive Linguistics. The Hague: Mouton De Gruyter. Cognitive
Linguistics Research Series.

I. MEANING, LANGUAGE, COGNITION

Linguists agree on one thing - that language is diabolically hard to study. They
do not always agree, however, on the how's, the why's, and the what for's: how
one should go about studying it and how speakers manage to do what they do; why
it is so hard and why exactly we bother to study it; what language is for, and
what linguistics is for. A mainstream view that has been popular in the last thirty
years (but not necessarily before that) offers the following answers.

How linguists do it: they collect grammaticality judgments from natives and concurrently
build and check hypotheses about the formal structure of particular languages
and languages in general. How humans do it: they come equipped biologically with
innate language-specific universals, that require only minimal fine-tuning when
exposed to a particular specimen. Why it's hard: easy for the child who has the
innate universals already set up, hard for the linguist lost in a forest of idiosyncrasies
that hide the deeper principles. Why bother? So that we can discover such principles.

What is language for? The story here is that this question is not a priority for
the scientist. We can worry later about function, communication, and meaning generally.
And what is linguistics for? Well, there is the platonic reward of discovering
structure for the sake of structure itself. And then there is biology: Since the
universals are in the brain, they must also be in the genes; linguistics is theoretical
biology; geneticists and neuroscientists will fill in the messy details of its
implementation in our bodies.

This strange and simple story contains its own methods and generalizations. The
appropriate methods are in the 'how to do it' - collecting grammaticality judgments
and so on. What counts as generalizations are the formal principles that apply
to wider ranges of phenomena and/or languages.

In contrast to this sharply autonomous view of language structure, cognitive linguistics
has resurrected an older tradition. In that tradition, language is in the service
of constructing and communicating meaning, and it is for the linguist and cognitive
scientist a window into the mind. Seeing through that window, however, is not
obvious. Deep features of our thinking, cognitive processes, and social communication
need to be brought in, correlated, and associated with their linguistic manifestations.

The cognitive linguistics enterprise, we believe, has already been remarkably
successful. It is not far-fetched to say that perhaps for the first time a genuine
science of meaning construction and its dynamics has been launched. This has been
achieved by intensively studying and modeling the cognition that lies behind language
and goes far beyond it, but which language reflects in certain ways, and which
in turn supports the dynamics of language use, language change, and language organization.
Echoing Erving Goffman, I have called this backstage cognition. Language is only
the tip of a spectacular cognitive iceberg, and when we engage in any language
activity, be it mundane or artistically creative, we draw unconsciously on vast
cognitive resources, call up innumerable models and frames, set up multiple connections,
coordinate large arrays of information, and engage in creative mappings, transfers,
and elaborations. This is what language is about and what language is for. Backstage
cognition includes viewpoints and reference points, figure-ground / profile-base
/ landmark-trajector organization, metaphorical, analogical, and other mappings,
idealized models, framing, construal, mental spaces, counterpart connections,
roles, prototypes, metonymy, polysemy, conceptual blending, fictive motion, force
dynamics.

Well, where does all this come from? Did it all just spring up in the fertile
mind of cognitive linguists, giving them an unlimited supply of new notions to
draw from in order to explain some linguistic facts that they wish to talk about?
And if so, isn't all this a considerable weakening of linguistic theory, letting
in so many flaky new gimmicks that virtually anything at all becomes easily but
vacuously explainable?

Mais pas du tout. Rather remarkably, all the aspects of backstage cognition
just alluded to receive ample justification on non-linguistic grounds from a variety
of sources. Some have been extensively studied in psychology (e.g. prototypes,
figure- ground, analogy), others in artificial intelligence and/or sociology (frames,
roles, cultural models), literature and philosophy (metaphor). Metonymy, mental
spaces, force dynamics, conceptual blending, initially studied primarily by linguists
have been shown to apply to cognition generally. The notion of viewpoint and reference
point is presumably even more general, given the nature of our visual systems
and orientation. Needless to say, all these features of backstage cognition deserve
to be studied and understood in their own right, not just as a means of explaining
linguistic distributions. To cognitive scientists who are not linguists, the linguistic
distributions matter very little. And for cognitive linguists, there has been
a major shift of interest. The cognitive constructs, operations, and dynamics,
and the understanding of conceptual systems have become a central focus of analysis.
The linguistic distributions are just one of many sources of relevant data.

This shift bears on the methods employed and the generalizations obtained. Methods
must extend to contextual aspects of language use and to non-linguistic cognition.
This means studying full discourse, language in context, inferences actually drawn
by participants in an exchange, applicable frames, implicit assumptions and construal,
to name just a few. It means being on the look-out for manifestations of conceptual
thought in everyday life, movies, literature, and science. This is because introspection
and intuition are woefully insufficient to tell us about general operations of
meaning construction. When we volunteer a meaning for an isolated sentence, we
do it typically on the basis of defaults and prototypes. It is only in rich contexts
that we see the full force of creative on-line meaning construction.

As for generalizations, the most powerful ones are those which transcend specific
cognitive domains. In our work on conceptual blending, we see as a strong generalization
the discovery that the same principles apply to framing, metaphor, action and
design, and grammatical constructions. This is not an internal generalization
about language, it is an external one relating linguistic phenomena to non-linguistic
ones. Such generalizations seem primordial to the understanding of how language
relates to general cognition, but they are precluded in principle by the autonomous
approach evoked above. It is no surprise, then, if that approach finds no connection
between language and the rest of cognition, for that autonomy is built into the
very method that serves to build up the field of inquiry and the theories that
are its by-products.

Although cognitive linguistics espouses the age-old view that language is in the
service of meaning, its methods and results have been quite novel. The results
in fact have been somewhat surprising. At the most general level, here are three
that I find striking. I will call them respectively Economy, Operational Uniformity,
Cognitive Generalization.

ECONOMY AND THE ELIZA EFFECT

By Economy, I mean the following: any language form in context has the potential
to trigger massive cognitive constructions, including analogical mappings, mental
space connections, reference point organization, blends, and simulation of complex
scenes. When we try to spell out backstage cognition in detail, we are struck
by the contrast between the extreme brevity of the linguistic form and the spectacular
wealth of the corresponding meaning construction. Very sparse grammar guides us
along the same rich mental paths, by prompting us to perform complex cognitive
operations. What is remarkable is that by and large subjects engage in quite similar
constructions on the basis of similar grammatical prompts, and thereby achieve
a high degree of effective communication. The reason seems to be that the cultural,
contextual, and cognitive substrate on which the language forms operate is sufficiently
uniform across interlocutors to allow for a reasonable degree of consistency in
the unfolding of the prompted meaning constructions. How this works remains in
many ways mysterious. What is clear is that language is radically different from
an information carrying and information preserving system, such as a code or telecommunications.
Language forms carry very little information per se, but can latch on to rich
preexistent networks in the subjects' brains and trigger massive sequential and
parallel activations. Those activated networks are of course themselves in the
appropriate state by virtue of general organization due to cognition and culture,
and local organization due to physical and mental context. Crucially, we have
no awareness of this amazing chain of cognitive events that takes place as we
talk and listen, except for the external manifestation of language (sounds, words,
sentences) and the internal manifestation of meaning: with lightning speed, we
experience meaning. This is very similar to perception, which is also instantaneous
and immediate with no awareness of the extraordinarily complex intervening neural
events.

What we are conscious of determines our folk-theories of what is going on. In
the case of perception, the folk theory, an extremely useful one for us as living
organisms, is that everything we perceive is indeed directly the very essence
of the object perceived, out there in the world and independent of us. The effect
is contained entirely in the cause. In the same way, our folk theory of language
is that the meanings are contained directly in the words and their combinations,
since that is all that we are ever consciously aware of. The effect (meaning)
is attributed essentially to the visible cause (language). And again, this folk-theory
is extremely useful to us as human organisms in everyday life. It makes sense.
At another level, the level of scientific inquiry, this folk-theory, like other
folk-theories, is wrong, and the information processing model of language breaks
down. This reveals that, as humans experiencing language, we are fooled by an
interesting variant of the Eliza effect. The famous computer program Eliza produced
what looked like a sensible interaction between a psychiatrist and a subject operating
the program, but the rich meaning that seemed to emanate from the machine was
in fact read in (constructed) by the subject. And strikingly, just like a perceptual
illusion, this effect cannot easily be suspended by rational denial. In the case
of Eliza, the illusion may be hard to block, but it is easy to see. The more general
illusion that meaning is in the language forms is both hard to repress and hard
to acknowledge. And for that reason, it has made its way into many scientific
accounts of language. In such accounts, the notion that forms have meaning is
unproblematic, and the "only" problem becomes to give a formal characterization
of such meanings associated with forms. Clearly, if the presupposition that there
are such meanings is in error, the very foundations of such accounts are in jeopardy.
It has been, I believe, a major contribution of cognitive linguistics to dispel
this very strong unquestioned assumption.

OPERATIONAL UNIFORMITY

It is commonly thought that very different operations apply to the various levels
of linguistic analysis. For example, syntax governs the sentence, and semantics
provides it compositionally with a meaning. At a higher level, other quite different
operations apply to produce implicatures, derived meaning, indirect speech acts.
Then rhetorical and figurative devices may kick in, such as metaphor and metonymy.
Our findings suggest a very different picture. Backstage cognition operates in
many ways uniformly at all levels. Figure- ground and viewpoint organization pervades
the sentence (Talmy (1978).; Langacker (19987/1991), the Tense system (Cutrer
(1994)., Narrative structure (Sanders and Redeker (1996)., in signed and spoken
languages, and of course many aspects of non- linguistic cognition. Metaphor builds
up meaning all the way from the most basic levels to the most sophisticated and
creative ones (Lakoff and Turner (1989); Grady (1997)). And the same goes for
metonymic pragmatic functions (Nunberg (1978)) and mental space connections (Sweetser
and Fauconnier (1996), Van Hoek (1996), Liddell (1996), which are governed by
the same general Access principle. Frames, schemas and prototypes account for
word level and sentence level syntactic/semantic properties in cognitive and construction
grammar (Lakoff (1987), Fillmore (1985), Goldberg (1997), Langacker (1987/91)),
and of course they guide thought and action more generally (Bateson (1972), Goffman
(1974), Rosch;). Conceptual blending and analogy play a key role in syntax and
morphology (Mandelblit (1997)), in word and sentence level semantics (Sweetser),
and at higher levels of reasoning and rhetoric (Robert (1998), Coulson (1997),
Turner (1996) ). Similarly, we find force dynamics and fictive motion (Talmy (1985,
1998) operating at all levels (single words, entire systems, like the modals,
and general framing).

This operational uniformity is unexpected, remarkable, and counter-intuitive.
It has taken cognitive linguists a lot of hard work and theoretical conceptual
rethinking to uncover this series of powerful generalizations. There are quite
a few interesting reasons for the difficulty of thinking in this new way. One
is that language does not come with its backstage cognition neatly displayed 'on
its sleeve'. Everything that counts is deeply hidden from our consciousness, and
masked by the 'folk theory' effects mentioned earlier. Another difficulty has
to do with the long tradition of apprehending limited aspects of language in a
self- contained, language-specific, descriptive apparatus. The resulting specialized
technical vocabulary has been immensely helpful in launching a coherent linguistic
science, but regrettably it has also shielded linguistics from a more comprehensive
cognitive framework in which the right questions could be asked.

COGNITIVE GENERALIZATION

Operational uniformity, as outlined in the previous section, pertains essentially
to language and reasoning. The uniformity is across linguistic levels, the word,
the sentence, the sentence and its context, the whole discourse, and ultimately
general reasoning. And yet, there are broader and even more interesting generalizations,
those that transcend specific cognitive domains. Cognitive linguists have been
especially attentive to this dimension of the new research, and they have argued
persuasively for the cognitive generality of the mappings, correspondences, bindings,
integration, perspectival organization, windows of attention, pragmatic functions,
framing, force dynamics, prototype structures, and dynamic simulations that underlie
the construction of meaning as reflected by language use. As a result, linguistics
is no longer a self- contained account of the internal properties of languages;
it is in its own right a powerful means of revealing and explaining general aspects
of human cognition.

References

Bateson, G. 1972. Steps to an Ecology of the Mind. New York: Ballantine
Books.

Robert, Adrian. 1998. Blending in the interpretation of mathematical proofs. In:
Discourse and Cognition: Bridging the Gap. Edited by Jean-Pierre Koenig.
Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI) [distributed
by Cambridge University Press].

Sanders, J. and G. Redeker. 1996. Perspective and the Representation of Speech
and Thought in Narrative Discourse. In Fauconnier, G. & E. Sweetser, eds. Spaces,
Worlds, and Grammar. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Sweetser, E. 1990. From etymology to pragmatics: the mind-as-body metaphor
in semantic structure and semantic change. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.